Thread: Gear Dyeing in 2.0

Originally Posted by gahoo

If your question is whether the current alpha build of ARR has this feature already, or whether it has been announced that ARR will 100% have the dying scheme that Yoshida wanted, you know full well that that hasn't been answered yet.

This is why I'm asking. I know it hasn't been answered. I don't mind if alpha doesn't have it, will the retail version have it?

The Color ID system to me just means that the color will no longer be in the name of the item. I don't think it has much to do with the actual colors themselves. It may be a means to that end however.

If a dev replies, please also let us know if we will be using the existing dyes for this functionality in case it is implemented. I am sitting on maybe 30 stacks right now just to make sure I can experiment with different colors and combinations in 2.0.

From a technical standpoint it sounds like they do not want to use a system that other games use where they just tint the base armor. The problem with this system is the color washes over the entire armor model so if you have armor that is base white with gold trim and you dye it blue then the white in the armor becomes blue and the gold trim becomes this dark blue color.

Currently FF14 doesn't use such a system. Armor color variations are handled by actual texture swaps which was likely chosen so they could have some color variations without armor details and trims looking terrible due to color tinting.

The development updates seem to point to resource concerns adding new colors so it sounds like they aren't looking to move away from the texture swap system in favor of a tint system as a tint system wouldn't require much in the way of resources to add more colors. So my expectation would be that we're probably going to still see limitation in armor dyes as they seem to want to control how dyed armor looks which is fine with me. Honestly the games with tint systems just end up looking terrible with many people just looking like tinted blobs of bright pinks, yellows and greens. While not being able to provide as many options, the texture system at least allows the developers to design properly recolored armor.

Edit: Just read about the update a while back where they are talking about editing the material only. This could work with similar results as the current texture swap system where only parts of a texture would be tinted, but there would still be a tint on the actual material which can still look pretty crappy depending on the 'material type' that is being tinted. An example would be a chain mail weave texture where they use gradients to black to simulate depth. If you tint this material, it would tint the gradient and not look as good as the base texture did. Another example is leather where you can see the stitching. The stitching would be tinted as well and not look as good. You could control this more by making it where you are unable to tint material on parts of armor that wouldn't look good.

Either way I hope they are reasonable with this. I'm fine with some customization but I think there needs to be some restriction on customization for the sake of the overall look of the game. I think it would make some sense to only allow certain colors on certain material and stick with a custom color palette that matches the design of the game.

Originally Posted by indira

the tint system is monochrome texture with a layer of color you choose its basicly a indexed layer, SE uses single textures for each color, the .dat's tell all. ps3 can support a few layers for each texture why not use it they only need one extra.
SE is stuck in the old ps1 & n64 style of dooing things when everything was limited like crazy.

The problem is that tints the entire texture as I described. You may not want part of the texture tinted. The other problem is while you could use more layers to color areas of objects selectively you'd have to use up layers that are used for other effects such as lightmapping, heightmapping, shader layers, etc. So I don't know if they have more than one layer to work with on the tinting. Most game engines these days do not with the amount of texture layering dedicated to shader effects.

I don't think it's about using an old way as you suggest and more about a desire to have properly colored armor rather than just tinting the entire texture with a color. Take cobalt plate as example. Notice the gold trim for blue and red cobalt is still gold. If they colored it using the transparent tint layer you mentioned then the gold trim on red cobalt would end up an orangish color and the gold trim on the blue cobalt would end up greenish.